This session explores California State University Northridge, Tseng College’s pilot to evaluate Blackboard Ally. Ally is a product that integrates into the LMS to provide real-time feedback on content accessibility as well as creation of alternative formats. We will discuss our experience during the pilot and lessons learned.
Nearly 1 in 5 people have a disability in the United States, with prevalence continuing to increase (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). Attention must be given to ensure full opportunity within society and especially in education. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a law that prohibits discrimination and ensures that the people with disability have the same rights and opportunities as their non-disabled counterparts (Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990).
In light of this, a frequent concern of educators is, how they can effectively teach their students with disabilities (Meyer & Rose, 2000). The institutional challenge includes lack of clarity of what accessibility really entails and where to begin (Linder, Fontaine-Rainen & Behling, 2015). The initiative to ensure accessibility is made complex by the diversity of format and volume of content being produced. When producing content for electronic delivery, such as through a Learning Management System (LMS), care must be taken to ensure equitable access to all content items. Often Individuals responsible for acquiring or creating content and delivery technologies assume that digital materials are going to be accessible for their students or clients with disabilities, by virtue of being digital, but digital doesn't necessarily mean accessible. (Kurzweil, n.d.) For example an instructor may post a scanned article assuming it will be accessible to all; however, a student with a text disability (e.g., blindness or dyslexia) will find the content of the file completely inaccessible. Similarly, if an instructor posts a lecture video without closed captions a student who is deaf or hard of hearing may receive no benefit from this lecture. Even if an instructor is aware of accessibility and wants to make their content available to all students, they may not know where to begin. It can seem a daunting task.
The California State University (CSU) system has been a strong advocate for making digital materials accessible. By focusing on the needs of users and by implementing accessibility best practices, California State University Northridge (CSUN) works to comply with Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Code and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). CSUN’s Tseng College is a significant producer of online and hybrid courses. Tseng College has been a pioneer in promoting and producing accessible content. When instructors work with the college’s distance learning unit to prepare their online courses, the instructional designers and technology specialists are able to provide information on creating accessible course materials. After instructors have created course assets, technology team members evaluate them for accessibility issues and provide suggestions for remediation. However, this manual testing of accessibility can become a bottleneck and pose some challenges as the volume of courses and content increases.
Assistive Technology has increased higher education opportunity for students with disabilities. As long as the content has been properly formatted, students with disabilities should have full access. The difficulty lies in finding a solution that can provide content creators with quick feedback on accessibility issues and remediation recommendations. Blackboard Ally is one such tool that is in its early stages of release. There are three components of Ally: faculty facing accessibility feedback, student facing alternative formats, and institutional reporting. It has some limitations in capability at this point; however, there is an ambitious roadmap for improvements.
Blackboard Ally has won the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications' (WCET) WOW Award in 2017, “as an outstanding reflection of the innovation, quality, leadership, and vision needed to help students, faculty, and institutions succeed in higher education today.” Ally is a product that can be integrated into the Learning Management System. Ally uses an automated checklist of common accessibility issues, assigning an accessibility score from 1 to 100 to each posted item. It flags inaccessible content and provides the reasoning and resources to remediate the content. With an automated tool, such as Ally, in addition to possibly missing some accessibility problems, there can also be issues with “false positives” where content is erroneously flagged. According to Moore (2018), “I have not yet found a digital tool that replaces human knowledge and experience when it comes to accessibility. I liken it to a warning light in their car -- it lets you know there’s an issue, but you still need to know whether that’s a serious thing or something that’s not that big of a deal.”
CSUN Tseng College is pilot testing Blackboard Ally to evaluate the strengths and limitations of this product, in hopes of establishing the role of automated accessibility tools in our production process. One goal of the pilot is to determine what aspects of accessibility checking can be automated, and what will still need to be a personnel-based process. According to Jared Smith, Associate Director of Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM), automated tools are able to identify a little more than a quarter of potential errors. “That means there’s another 70 percent that’s going to extend beyond the tools to identify,” (Lieberman, 2018).
In addition to providing a clear picture of our pilot process, we will share lessons learned, so that participants can benefit from our experience. After the 30-minute presentation, participants will be given a 5-minute reflection period, during which they will think about their own accessibility assessment and remediation needs, as well as any questions they may have regarding our pilot. A 10-minute Question & Answer period will follow, during which participants can ask any questions regarding the pilot as well as about the Ally tool in general. Presenters will also guide the discussion if it slows, by asking participants about their experiences and priorities related to accessibility.